Week 2: Guiness Stout

Well, since two out of the five votes cast for the next beer to go into the bread were for Guiness, Guiness it is!

Now, as anyone who actually knows me can attest, Guiness is my favorite beer of all. I can't even remember when I discovered it, though I'm pretty sure it was sometime at Beaudacious Bard College, just down Route 9G from the first beer/liquor superstore I'd ever seen, the marvelous BevWay (anyone know if they're still there? I mean, alcohol is a permanent sure-thing-seller, but still...). I love everything about it, watching the "waterfall" as it settles into a glass if it's been properly poured, its magnificent richness (my good friend The Sewer King calls it a "pork chop in a glass," as I'm sure many others do), its darkness and depth, its slight, coffee-like bitterness... Oh, I'm starting to regret my spontaneous decision to use the last bottle of the six-pack to make another loaf of bread.

Yes, bread. This is a blog about bread. Made from beer.

So how does the pork chop in a glass do as a bread ingredient?

Very well indeed.

Naturally Guiness bread has a lovely dark color inside and out. There is more of a contrast between its crust (and this recipe seems always to generate a lovely, crisp crust) and interior in terms of hue, but both partake in different shades of the same golden brown of the Newcastle Brown Bread. The bread looks like it would be a heavy, dense, rye-ish concoction but actually has a nice, light texture and is just moist enough to please a bread nut like YHBBB.* The flavor, too, is a bit of a surprise; the aforementioned coffee-like bitterness is there only as a hint and is apparent mostly in the crust.

Figuring Guiness Bread would have a strong flavor, I chose to play it off against a very different flavor for dinner. Alongside a West Lake Beef Soup (to be found in Martin Yan's CULINARY JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA, it features [homemade] beef broth, ground beef, julienned leeks, egg whites, carrots, white pepper and two different soy sauces) the Bread held its own but didn't compete so much as complete. That didn't sound pretentious at ALL, did it?

A second loaf was meant to keep the leftover soup company, and did so to a degree, but it mostly disappeared in random nibbling to enjoy its flavor over the course of a day or so. As I said, I like bread!

*YHBBB=Your Humble Beer Bread Blogger

Week 1: Newcastle Brown Ale

I've long been a fan of this smooth and flavorful English beer, a nice brown with just enough bite. I'm also a long-time fan of Newcastle United ever since I got a load of Alan Shearer in the 1996 World Cup!!

This being week one and my first few loaves (I plan to make at least two out of every six=pack in 2009; that leaves four beers to drink!), it's maybe too soon to tell if this is from the maltodextrin in the self-rising flour or the Newcastle Brown itself, but the resulting bread has a nice, slightly malty flavor and the bread is the same lovely color from crust to core. It's going to be hard to beat!

I enjoyed my first loaf with a homemade Chicken Soup with Orzo. The soup was a little bland; I'd not had access to fresh ginger and substituted not enough ground ginger, I think. When I crumbed in a few handfuls of Newcastle Brown Ale Bread, it perked the soup right up. The result was utterly delicious!